ARTS WATCH. Rock review.

Los Van Van Bring Havana To Chicago

January 14, 1997|By Achy Obejas, Tribune Staff Writer.

Los Van Van amply demonstrated why they are Cuba's most popular band with two high-power, audacious sets at Martyr's Saturday night. Performing for the first time in Chicago, Juan Formell and his cohorts brought the downand-dirty sounds of Havana's streets up north, blowing away the frost on the windows of the Lincoln Avenue club.

Through 27 years of playing and constant hits, Los Van Van have presented a constantly evolving style they call songo. Based on the Cuban son, it integrates electric and electronic instruments into charanga's traditional piano, flute, bass, violin and percussion. Although on first listen it may sound like salsa, songo pushes the bass--Formell's instrument--and a thick soup of percussion up front and to the boiling point.

Saturday at Martyr's, Los Van Van's three singers--Pedro Clavo, Mario Rivera and Roberto Hernandez--toyed with their own forms of rap and other genres too. Hernandez, with his baseball cap, black T-shirt and loose open shirt, could have easily passed for a seasoned rapper.

All three of the singers have robust, masculine voices with a sassy, sexy rasp. Mostly improvising phrases around the son's fixed responses, they took turns at lead, singing about family, work and friends, as well as ever-so-metaphorically touching on Cuba's political situation.

While the music sent its listeners into a dark, deep groove, it also toyed with current events. On the surface, the lyrics of "Se Acabo El Querer" ("The Loving Has Stopped") may sound like a tale about the end of a love affair, but its release shortly after Cuba's campaign that used a logo reading "Cuba (heart) te quiero" ("I (heart) love Cuba") is not mere coincidence. In that context, the song is both brave and dangerous.

More to the point was Rivera's lead on "Amparame" ("God Save Me"), which he dedicated "to all the Cubans living outside Cuba . . . God save us. . . ." With the singers literally praying on their knees at one point, the overwhelmingly Cuban-American crowd at Martyr's was screaming by song's end.

The Cuban-Americans, while happily responding to Los Van Van's cues, musical and political, were less impressed with the group's introduction. When Carlos Flores of the Center for Black Music Research started talking in English, they yelled at him to speak in Spanish. And when Marguerite Horberg, executive director of the HotHouse, which sponsored the show, talked about doing political work alongside the Venceremos Brigade and the Cuba Coalition (neither one a Cuban or Cuban-American group), a handful started chanting, "Cuba, si; Fidel, no."